I also have it running on a bronze keyboard PB G3-- I've forgotten all my code names; it's bronze keyboard, but no firewire-- and it's very peppy. I think it's a 400 MHz, and it has 192 MB of RAM. It's not as fast as a G4 with Quartz Extreme, of course, but it's totally usable. Which is a pleasant surprise for a five-year-old (+/- 1) machine.
Dr. Bott has this "VGA Extractor for ADC" for us$35 plus S&H.
All the machines announced today come with an ADC-VGA adapter at no charge. If you acquire a DVI-VGA adapter, you can use two independent CRTs with your new machine.
Apple also sells the ADC-VGA adapter separately, but I'm too busy/lazy to look it up for you right now. You can find it at store.apple.com.
Is it just me, or did the price on the 17" iMac increase by $100?
I don't think so. I was at the local Apple Store this weekend drooling^W admiring the 17" iMac with Jaguar on it. I remember the price for the system being $1,999, which is the same price as they're listing on the Apple Store web site today.
But they did drop the price on the 15" non-SuperDrive models by $100.
(Not to mention the fact that when Apple quotes gigaflop figures they are talking about all-in-registers zero-pipeline-stall vectorized operation, not actually doing anything useful -- like reading from memory.)
Um. I'm no expert, but to me that sounds like any cache-resident vector function, like a 5x5 convolve or something. You take a small performance hit when you have to load the next cache line, but if you're lucky your pipeline is deep enough to keep the processor units going while that fetch happens.
I mean, how else are they supposed to quote processor performance if it's not this way? If you want them to talk about performance of the whole system, taking things like memory and busses into account, they're going to have to pick a real-world application to test with. They do that already, using Photoshop as their benchmark the same way the graphics board companies are using Quake as theirs. Apple's test shows the dual 1.2 GHz machine to be about 90% faster (or almost twice as fast) as a single-processor 2.5 GHz P4. And yet Apple still gets hell for using Photoshop as their metric.
Dude, did you somehow miss the part where they're selling dual-processor machines for the same price as they sold single-processor machines (modulo a hundred bucks or so) yesterday?
I can't believe the way you just glossed over that to talk about eject buttons on the optical drives! Your priorities are seriously out of whack.
In the meant time, I suppose I can just wait for Jaguar (10.2) to ship. Apparently it is almost as fast as a harware upgrade on a CD.
That's a really good description of the 10.2 experience. Apple could have marketed it that way. I have 6C106 running on several machines, G3s and G4s, but my personal machine is a 500 MHz iBook. OS X 10.2 6C106 makes my machine (get this) more responsive, more capable, more energy-efficient, and cooler!
I mean, I could understand faster and more features; that's what OS upgrades are good for. But something in the new power management subsystem has tripled my battery life (no kidding) and seriously reduces the amount of heat that my iBook generates. I used to get uncomfortable after using my laptop for an hour or 90 minutes because the trackpad and palm-rests were hot to the touch. It was okay, though, because the battery would be almost flat by that time. But now I get three plus hours of battery and the machine is always cool to the touch. I don't know if that comes from hard drive spin-down or from processor cycling, but I love it.
Incidentally, that three-plus hours is doing stuff like surfing and email and MS Word, but it's with the AirPort card on.
Mac OS X 10.2 really is like a hardware upgrade on a CD, at least for us laptop owners.
It's all about the software though. 10.1 is superb - 10.2 is alleged to be a big improvement. Who cares how fast your G4 is clocked? It won't run OS X.
Uh... is there some joke in here that I haven't gotten?
Incidentally, 10.2 is a big improvement. I've been running 6C106 (the release was 6C115) for about 10 days now. It's heaven, really peppy even on 400-500 MHz G3 systems.
It's very likely that apple are pumping out dual g4 systems to simply get rid of the remaining g4 chips...
No, I don't think so. I think they're moving entirely to multiple processors in the towers for two reasons. First, they're more clearly distinguishing between the iMac and the tower. Yesterday, a low-end G4 seriously overlapped the top-of-the-line iMac. Today, the line is clearer.
The other thing is that Apple's proud of the degree to which Jaguar is threaded at low levels of the OS. Dual-processor machines really will be faster, even for just basic surfing and email and whatnot, than otherwise equivalent single-processor machines.
Incidentally, was anybody else slightly surprised that Apple didn't just double the whole product line, introducing "small" and "medium" dual-proc machines and a "large" quad-processor system at the $4,000 price point?
I'm assuming the dual 867 will give me better performance overall (using Photoshop, Office v.X, Illustrator, Quark) than the single 933, correct?
Only if you're doing more than one thing at the same time.;-)
The answer is yeah, overall the dual-proc machine should be faster than the single-proc machine, thanks to new multithreading enhancements in the Finder and the faster busses.
And the way they did it! Yesterday $1600 (more or less) bought you a single-proc machine. Today, $1600 (more or less) buys you a dual-proc machine at the same or slightly better speed.
I've already spec'd out my dream machine. (Realistically, that is.) It comes in just over $2,000, all-inclusive. For more than twice the oomph I could have gotten yesterday.
Audio starts at the same time as the video, thinking about where you're recording, and how best to mic it to avoid extraneous noises.
Not exactly. Most film is shot either with reference ambient audio, or completely MOS, and the dialogue is ADR'd later, and audio effects added by foley artists. In video sometimes it's done in situ, but there's a lot of ADR and foley in video as well.
Audio really is a separate art from video.
There is no reason to have professional audio finishing tools in a professional video finishing package. However, in a prosumer video package, there IS a need to have audio finishing tools.
And I would submit to you that the audio tools in Final Cut Pro and similar products are just about on par with the video tools in Final Cut Pro and similar products.;-)
However, in a professional environment, they wouldn't be using FCP or Primere... They'd be using 20k+ Avids.
Not exactly. There's offlining and then there's finishing. If you're offlining you might use a $30,000 Avid Express, but these days it's just as likely that you'd be using Final Cut Pro.
On the other hand if you're finishing, you're using a linear bay, or a DS, or a Fire or Smoke. Those are all $100,000 - $300,000 systems.
There's really not much room in the market for the $30,000 editing system these days.
...Masters' and Doctoral thesis projects... and every last one of them treated audio as the last step of the project.
Um... that's because audio is the last step of the project. Like I said, audio finishing is an art entirely separate from video finishing, and is dealt with using different tools, by a different artist. There's no reason to have professional audio finishing tools in a professional video finishing package. They just don't go together.
Friend, everything you said is perfectly valid, but... video finishing is not audio finishing. Fire, DS, EditBox, et cetera are not audio finishing equipment. They have audio input and output capabilities, of course, and you can mix tracks and whatnot. But that's just for scratch audio. The real audio will get mixed and laid down by an audio professional in a ProTools (or similar) suite after the editor finishes the video.
Basically, the reason why nobody cares about audio in video editing software is because the guy doing the video work is never the same person as the guy doing the audio work. Instead, it's two different people, both highly trained professionals, with totally different areas of expertise.
Now, if you want to complain about how a particular audio finishing program is inadequate, be my guest. But complaining about how video editing software is a bad audio editing tool is kind of like complaining about what a poor job your screwdriver does of carving your Christmas goose.
No, he was right the first time. Spending a fortune rewriting components that are already available is an incredibly stupid idea. The only possible motivation for doing something like that would be the precise sort of FUD that you're slinging: "when Microsoft made it too legally difficult to extend their applications..." Please. You can't base a business plan on unfounded speculation about what Microsoft might do, despite their repeated statements that the won't do it, and the fact that there's no sound reason for them to do it.
We all know you hate Microsoft. That doesn't mean this guy's business plan of using COM components to build their application is a bad idea.
Look at it this way: they're out there selling products, while the open source guys are still figuring out how to build the human interfaces for their various word processors. Which one of those approaches is more sound?
I mean, choice is good, but we also need to hammer in to the minds of office managers (via mantra) that StarOffice is "just as good as" and "a suitable replacement for" MS Office.
The only problem with this idea is that StarOffice-- as anybody who has actually tried to use it in a business setting knows-- isn't "just as good as" or "a suitable replacement for" MS Office.
Evangelizing about StarOffice-- or any of the open source office software products-- right now would do serious damage to the reputation of open source software. When serious business users look at an open source office suite, they're not going to say, "This software, while unfinished, has a lot of potential. I'm excited and intrigued!" Instead, they're going to say, "Those open source nuts clearly don't get it. I've tried their software, and found it wanting. I will ignore them from now on and stick with what works: good old Office XP."
Evangelizing a new product or technology too early can result in its failure rather than its adoption.
I run YDL 2.2 and before that I ran 2.1 on a QuickSilver (867 Mhz) PowerMac. I have been running glitch free for over a year now and my uptime is currently 85 days (power outage caused a reboot).
Somebody has to say it.
I run Mac OS X 10.2 (6C106, developer seed) and before that I ran 10.1 on an iBook (500 MHz). I have been running glitch free for over a year now and my uptime is currently only 4 days, because I just upgraded to Jaguar on Monday, but before that it averaged around 80 days between reboots for 10.1.2-10.1.5 maintenance upgrades.
And, unlike your experience with YDL, setting up OS X is definitely not a PITA. The new Jaguar installer is terrific. It's a two-stage install: boot from CDROM and install the new kernel and core OS on your hard drive, then reboot from your hard drive and install apps from the second CD. (This is all automatic. All you do is switch CDs when it asks you.) The really cool thing is that you don't reboot after installing from the second CD. The installer says, "You're all done, click Okay to quit the installer" (more or less), then you click Okay. About five seconds later, POOF! There's the login screen. It's not a big deal, but it's a great post-install experience. You finish the install, and then it's immediately time for you to log in and play with your new toy. Just great.
My whole point here is that I respect your decision to use Linux on your Mac... but I don't understand it at all.
You are wrong, my sugary friend. There's no moralizing going on here; I'm overweight myself, so I'll be the last person to look down on you for your diet.
IANAD either, but my girlfriend is a surgical resident. I'm handing her the keyboard at this point.
You're wrong. Type I diabetes mellitus has a strong genetic link (80% concordance in twins), but type II diabetes appears to be completely linked to sugar intake. It's correlated to obesity too (75% of patients are obese at time of diagnosis), but that appears to be a secondary correlation. Because type II diabetes is a slow, progressive disease, it's usually not diagnosed until many years after onset. A diet high in sugar leads to both obesity (sometimes) and diabetes. That's where the correlation comes from.
The mechanism works like this. When your blood sugar level rises, the pancreas is stimulated to make and release insulin. The insulin signals cells in muscles, fat, and the liver to absorb sugar from the blood and transport it into the interior of the cell.
People with type I diabetes have an auto-immunity to pancreatic insulin-producing b-cells. In other words, your immune system seeks out and destroys the cells that produce insulin, so your body can't regulate its blood sugar level. Type I diabetics require total insulin replacement to live, but that's all. It's a relatively simple disease that way: take your shots, monitor your blood sugar, and you'll be fine.
The pathology of type II diabetes is more complex. It's often a combination of insufficient insulin production in the pancreas and a resistance at the cell to the activity of insulin. In other words, type II diabetics may not have enough insulin, or their body may not respond to insulin, or a combination of both.
When you eat, your body pancreas starts releasing insulin, which your muscle, fat, and liver cells absorb. If you eat A LOT of sugar, all at once, your body has to produce A LOT of insulin, all at once. If you eat a lot of sugar frequently, your body becomes "used" to it. It becomes less sensitive to high blood sugar, and starts producing less insulin. At the same time, your cells become "used" to having a lot of insulin around, so they stop absorbing it as much. When that happens, you can no longer regulate your blood sugar.
You can treat type II diabetics with insulin sometimes, but not always. If their cells aren't receptive to insulin, then giving them more won't help. In those cases, the patient is usually treated with metformin.
So taking good care of yourself in other ways won't necessarily keep you from developing type II diabetes. If your diet includes too much sugar, especially if you ingest it in a way that drives your blood sugar up dramatically, then you're at serious risk.
Do you suffer from excessive hunger or thirst? Do you get tired 2-4 hrs after you eat? Do you urinate frequently? Do you ever suffer from blurred vision? Your doctor can test your urine to see if you're peeing out glucose. If you don't eat for several hours and your urine still has glucose in it, that's an indication that you may have some degree of type II diabetes.
If you do develop type II diabetes, chances are you won't know about it for years and years, because it's so gradual. By then, moderate to serious neuropathy may have set in, as well as a degree of retinopathy. Circulation to your extremities will have been reduced. If you let it go for too long, you could end up losing your sight, or your legs. I did a BKA (below knee amputation) on a 67-year-old type II diabetic on Tuesday. He wasn't obese, either.
In case you can ony think in single syllables I'll try a third form: Leave!
No, no! Don't you see, this guy is the best thing that's happened to Mac evangelism in a long, long time. If the PC fanatics argue that Macs are more expensive, or that they have fewer games available, they come off sounding reasonable. You actually have to refute their arguments to get people to see reason.
But guys like this make claims like "Microsoft's hardware is better than Apple's!" That kind of statement is obviously false on its face, even to the most uncritical reader. One glance at that kind of bull leads even the most jaded person to the obvious conclusion: "Hey, maybe I should go check out the Apple store."
Explain to me how your 51:1 compressed video looks "virtually indistinguishable from the uncompressed master", unless of course you've never actually seen uncompressed 1080i.
Two reasons: your monitor, and the nature of temporal compression.
Consumer HD equipment can't resolve all of the lines in an HD frame. My personal set will hold about 800 lines, which isn't bad at all. Average consumer gear will hold maybe 600. A Sony broadcast monitor will hold 1000, or even more. So "softness" that shows up on a 40" broadcast monitor can't be seen on even the best 34" home set.
Furthermore, MPEG-2 compression works by reducing the number of bits used to describe a segment of the stream, rather than by reducing the number of bits used for every frame. If you shoot actors in front of a fixed camera, MPEG-2 will be able to compress that stream significantly because the background doesn't change at all from one frame to the next. Most of the pixels won't change, or at least they won't change much.
Of course, if you swish-pan the camera around, the the difference between frame N and frame N+1 will be very great, so you won't be able to describe each frame as fully within the maximum number of bits per second, so you'll get visible artifacts.
I've seen side-by-side comparisons at WFAA-TV in Dallas, which has been broadcasting OTA HD for several years now. They used to-- I don't know if they still do-- have two identical Sony HD monitors in their control room, one showing the uncompressed 272M feed going to the encoder and another showing the "monitor" output from the encoder, showing the 19.3 Mbps signal that would go out over the tower. Ignoring the (roughly) 2 second delay for encoding, the two signals looked pretty much identical.
I have no doubt that that's true in the UK; since I've never been there, I'll take your word for it.
But I own an HDTV. I watch, I guess, about eight or ten hours of week of over-the-air HD programming. (If you take out Leno, which I watch in spite of the host, that comes down to about 3-5 hours a week.)
Over-the-air HD programming in the US is pretty f*cking amazing. I've got a trained eye, I suppose you'd say, so I can see compression artifacts when watching some sports programming, but it's visually indistinguishable from uncompressed HD almost all the time. And my girlfriend, who isn't used to looking for artifacts, thinks it's positively perfect.
Digital transmission-- be it over wires or 8VSB or satellite-- is just a medium, like any other. It can be used to carry a clean signal or a noisy one, depending on what you feed into it and other outside factors.
For example, I used to have digital cable TV, for standard definition programming. The picture looked like ass, because the cable company was compressing it down to 1 Mbps or less for transmission, in order to squeeze more channels into their service. Naturally, I cancelled their service and bought a satellite dish. It's not uncompressed, by any means, but it's much better.
So don't just jump to the conclusion that "digital TV is nearly unwatchable." It's more accurate to say that a particular broadcaster's signal-- which happens to be a digital signal-- is nearly unwatchable. For every shitty 2 Mbps cable channel out there, there's a 19 Mbps OTA HD station showing programming that's virtually indistinguishable from the uncompressed master.
(Okay, actually the ratio isn't anywhere near one-to-one yet, and I know that. I was just trying to make the point that digital != bad, but rather some digital == bad while some digital == good.)
Tried Chimera, or any other alternate Gecko frontends?
Yup. They're all embarrassingly slow, sorry to say. I don't mean any disrespect to the hard work that no doubt have gone into these various projects, but they're just not usable browsers yet.
OmniWeb, on the other hand, is fast on my relatively old hardware (400 and 500 MHz G3s), feature-rich, and rock-solid stable.
If you are in first or business class, you can always buy their on-board power cords that hook up into the plane (depending on airline).
I know the submitter is going to Europe from the US, which makes it astoundingly unlikely that he's flying on Qantas, but I just wanted to chime in here and say from experience that Qantas does not, as far as I know, have DC power in any of their planes. I flew to Sydney recently, which is 14 hours from LAX. No power anywhere, not even up in First, according to the sexy stews-- er, I mean flight attendants. And that was on a relatively new 747-400!
Fortunately I knew in advance and I was able to expense five new batteries for my iBook. I watched five or six DVDs on the way down there.
(Oh, one more thing. If you pack a bunch of batteries, get to the airport extra early. Those things show up as solid white rectangles on x-ray monitors. The security people don't like that, especially when you're carrying half a dozen of 'em.)
First of all, I'm getting pretty tired of this "what part of blank do you not understand" thing. It's trite. Find a new expression.
More importantly, though, why did you take my statement out of context? The poster said he thought my idea was ludicrous. I replied that nobody asked him whether it's ludicrous or not.
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I also have it running on a bronze keyboard PB G3-- I've forgotten all my code names; it's bronze keyboard, but no firewire-- and it's very peppy. I think it's a 400 MHz, and it has 192 MB of RAM. It's not as fast as a G4 with Quartz Extreme, of course, but it's totally usable. Which is a pleasant surprise for a five-year-old (+/- 1) machine.
Dr. Bott has this "VGA Extractor for ADC" for us$35 plus S&H.
All the machines announced today come with an ADC-VGA adapter at no charge. If you acquire a DVI-VGA adapter, you can use two independent CRTs with your new machine.
Apple also sells the ADC-VGA adapter separately, but I'm too busy/lazy to look it up for you right now. You can find it at store.apple.com.
Is it just me, or did the price on the 17" iMac increase by $100?
I don't think so. I was at the local Apple Store this weekend drooling^W admiring the 17" iMac with Jaguar on it. I remember the price for the system being $1,999, which is the same price as they're listing on the Apple Store web site today.
But they did drop the price on the 15" non-SuperDrive models by $100.
(Not to mention the fact that when Apple quotes gigaflop figures they are talking about all-in-registers zero-pipeline-stall vectorized operation, not actually doing anything useful -- like reading from memory.)
Um. I'm no expert, but to me that sounds like any cache-resident vector function, like a 5x5 convolve or something. You take a small performance hit when you have to load the next cache line, but if you're lucky your pipeline is deep enough to keep the processor units going while that fetch happens.
I mean, how else are they supposed to quote processor performance if it's not this way? If you want them to talk about performance of the whole system, taking things like memory and busses into account, they're going to have to pick a real-world application to test with. They do that already, using Photoshop as their benchmark the same way the graphics board companies are using Quake as theirs. Apple's test shows the dual 1.2 GHz machine to be about 90% faster (or almost twice as fast) as a single-processor 2.5 GHz P4. And yet Apple still gets hell for using Photoshop as their metric.
Seems like you can never satisfy everybody.
Dude, did you somehow miss the part where they're selling dual-processor machines for the same price as they sold single-processor machines (modulo a hundred bucks or so) yesterday?
I can't believe the way you just glossed over that to talk about eject buttons on the optical drives! Your priorities are seriously out of whack.
In the meant time, I suppose I can just wait for Jaguar (10.2) to ship. Apparently it is almost as fast as a harware upgrade on a CD.
That's a really good description of the 10.2 experience. Apple could have marketed it that way. I have 6C106 running on several machines, G3s and G4s, but my personal machine is a 500 MHz iBook. OS X 10.2 6C106 makes my machine (get this) more responsive, more capable, more energy-efficient, and cooler!
I mean, I could understand faster and more features; that's what OS upgrades are good for. But something in the new power management subsystem has tripled my battery life (no kidding) and seriously reduces the amount of heat that my iBook generates. I used to get uncomfortable after using my laptop for an hour or 90 minutes because the trackpad and palm-rests were hot to the touch. It was okay, though, because the battery would be almost flat by that time. But now I get three plus hours of battery and the machine is always cool to the touch. I don't know if that comes from hard drive spin-down or from processor cycling, but I love it.
Incidentally, that three-plus hours is doing stuff like surfing and email and MS Word, but it's with the AirPort card on.
Mac OS X 10.2 really is like a hardware upgrade on a CD, at least for us laptop owners.
It's all about the software though. 10.1 is superb - 10.2 is alleged to be a big improvement.
Who cares how fast your G4 is clocked? It won't run OS X.
Uh... is there some joke in here that I haven't gotten?
Incidentally, 10.2 is a big improvement. I've been running 6C106 (the release was 6C115) for about 10 days now. It's heaven, really peppy even on 400-500 MHz G3 systems.
It's very likely that apple are pumping out dual g4 systems to simply get rid of the remaining g4 chips...
No, I don't think so. I think they're moving entirely to multiple processors in the towers for two reasons. First, they're more clearly distinguishing between the iMac and the tower. Yesterday, a low-end G4 seriously overlapped the top-of-the-line iMac. Today, the line is clearer.
The other thing is that Apple's proud of the degree to which Jaguar is threaded at low levels of the OS. Dual-processor machines really will be faster, even for just basic surfing and email and whatnot, than otherwise equivalent single-processor machines.
Incidentally, was anybody else slightly surprised that Apple didn't just double the whole product line, introducing "small" and "medium" dual-proc machines and a "large" quad-processor system at the $4,000 price point?
I'm assuming the dual 867 will give me better performance overall (using Photoshop, Office v.X, Illustrator, Quark) than the single 933, correct?
;-)
Only if you're doing more than one thing at the same time.
The answer is yeah, overall the dual-proc machine should be faster than the single-proc machine, thanks to new multithreading enhancements in the Finder and the faster busses.
And the way they did it! Yesterday $1600 (more or less) bought you a single-proc machine. Today, $1600 (more or less) buys you a dual-proc machine at the same or slightly better speed.
I've already spec'd out my dream machine. (Realistically, that is.) It comes in just over $2,000, all-inclusive. For more than twice the oomph I could have gotten yesterday.
The new exteriors are sexy, too.
Audio starts at the same time as the video, thinking about where you're recording, and how best to mic it to avoid extraneous noises.
;-)
Not exactly. Most film is shot either with reference ambient audio, or completely MOS, and the dialogue is ADR'd later, and audio effects added by foley artists. In video sometimes it's done in situ, but there's a lot of ADR and foley in video as well.
Audio really is a separate art from video.
There is no reason to have professional audio finishing tools in a professional video finishing package. However, in a prosumer video package, there IS a need to have audio finishing tools.
And I would submit to you that the audio tools in Final Cut Pro and similar products are just about on par with the video tools in Final Cut Pro and similar products.
Not exactly. There's offlining and then there's finishing. If you're offlining you might use a $30,000 Avid Express, but these days it's just as likely that you'd be using Final Cut Pro.
On the other hand if you're finishing, you're using a linear bay, or a DS, or a Fire or Smoke. Those are all $100,000 - $300,000 systems.
There's really not much room in the market for the $30,000 editing system these days.
Um... that's because audio is the last step of the project. Like I said, audio finishing is an art entirely separate from video finishing, and is dealt with using different tools, by a different artist. There's no reason to have professional audio finishing tools in a professional video finishing package. They just don't go together.
Friend, everything you said is perfectly valid, but... video finishing is not audio finishing. Fire, DS, EditBox, et cetera are not audio finishing equipment. They have audio input and output capabilities, of course, and you can mix tracks and whatnot. But that's just for scratch audio. The real audio will get mixed and laid down by an audio professional in a ProTools (or similar) suite after the editor finishes the video.
Basically, the reason why nobody cares about audio in video editing software is because the guy doing the video work is never the same person as the guy doing the audio work. Instead, it's two different people, both highly trained professionals, with totally different areas of expertise.
Now, if you want to complain about how a particular audio finishing program is inadequate, be my guest. But complaining about how video editing software is a bad audio editing tool is kind of like complaining about what a poor job your screwdriver does of carving your Christmas goose.
No, he was right the first time. Spending a fortune rewriting components that are already available is an incredibly stupid idea. The only possible motivation for doing something like that would be the precise sort of FUD that you're slinging: "when Microsoft made it too legally difficult to extend their applications..." Please. You can't base a business plan on unfounded speculation about what Microsoft might do, despite their repeated statements that the won't do it, and the fact that there's no sound reason for them to do it.
We all know you hate Microsoft. That doesn't mean this guy's business plan of using COM components to build their application is a bad idea.
Look at it this way: they're out there selling products, while the open source guys are still figuring out how to build the human interfaces for their various word processors. Which one of those approaches is more sound?
I mean, choice is good, but we also need to hammer in to the minds of office managers (via mantra) that StarOffice is "just as good as" and "a suitable replacement for" MS Office.
The only problem with this idea is that StarOffice-- as anybody who has actually tried to use it in a business setting knows-- isn't "just as good as" or "a suitable replacement for" MS Office.
Evangelizing about StarOffice-- or any of the open source office software products-- right now would do serious damage to the reputation of open source software. When serious business users look at an open source office suite, they're not going to say, "This software, while unfinished, has a lot of potential. I'm excited and intrigued!" Instead, they're going to say, "Those open source nuts clearly don't get it. I've tried their software, and found it wanting. I will ignore them from now on and stick with what works: good old Office XP."
Evangelizing a new product or technology too early can result in its failure rather than its adoption.
I run YDL 2.2 and before that I ran 2.1 on a QuickSilver (867 Mhz) PowerMac. I have been running glitch free for over a year now and my uptime is currently 85 days (power outage caused a reboot).
Somebody has to say it.
I run Mac OS X 10.2 (6C106, developer seed) and before that I ran 10.1 on an iBook (500 MHz). I have been running glitch free for over a year now and my uptime is currently only 4 days, because I just upgraded to Jaguar on Monday, but before that it averaged around 80 days between reboots for 10.1.2-10.1.5 maintenance upgrades.
And, unlike your experience with YDL, setting up OS X is definitely not a PITA. The new Jaguar installer is terrific. It's a two-stage install: boot from CDROM and install the new kernel and core OS on your hard drive, then reboot from your hard drive and install apps from the second CD. (This is all automatic. All you do is switch CDs when it asks you.) The really cool thing is that you don't reboot after installing from the second CD. The installer says, "You're all done, click Okay to quit the installer" (more or less), then you click Okay. About five seconds later, POOF! There's the login screen. It's not a big deal, but it's a great post-install experience. You finish the install, and then it's immediately time for you to log in and play with your new toy. Just great.
My whole point here is that I respect your decision to use Linux on your Mac... but I don't understand it at all.
You are wrong, my sugary friend. There's no moralizing going on here; I'm overweight myself, so I'll be the last person to look down on you for your diet.
IANAD either, but my girlfriend is a surgical resident. I'm handing her the keyboard at this point.
You're wrong. Type I diabetes mellitus has a strong genetic link (80% concordance in twins), but type II diabetes appears to be completely linked to sugar intake. It's correlated to obesity too (75% of patients are obese at time of diagnosis), but that appears to be a secondary correlation. Because type II diabetes is a slow, progressive disease, it's usually not diagnosed until many years after onset. A diet high in sugar leads to both obesity (sometimes) and diabetes. That's where the correlation comes from.
The mechanism works like this. When your blood sugar level rises, the pancreas is stimulated to make and release insulin. The insulin signals cells in muscles, fat, and the liver to absorb sugar from the blood and transport it into the interior of the cell.
People with type I diabetes have an auto-immunity to pancreatic insulin-producing b-cells. In other words, your immune system seeks out and destroys the cells that produce insulin, so your body can't regulate its blood sugar level. Type I diabetics require total insulin replacement to live, but that's all. It's a relatively simple disease that way: take your shots, monitor your blood sugar, and you'll be fine.
The pathology of type II diabetes is more complex. It's often a combination of insufficient insulin production in the pancreas and a resistance at the cell to the activity of insulin. In other words, type II diabetics may not have enough insulin, or their body may not respond to insulin, or a combination of both.
When you eat, your body pancreas starts releasing insulin, which your muscle, fat, and liver cells absorb. If you eat A LOT of sugar, all at once, your body has to produce A LOT of insulin, all at once. If you eat a lot of sugar frequently, your body becomes "used" to it. It becomes less sensitive to high blood sugar, and starts producing less insulin. At the same time, your cells become "used" to having a lot of insulin around, so they stop absorbing it as much. When that happens, you can no longer regulate your blood sugar.
You can treat type II diabetics with insulin sometimes, but not always. If their cells aren't receptive to insulin, then giving them more won't help. In those cases, the patient is usually treated with metformin.
So taking good care of yourself in other ways won't necessarily keep you from developing type II diabetes. If your diet includes too much sugar, especially if you ingest it in a way that drives your blood sugar up dramatically, then you're at serious risk.
Do you suffer from excessive hunger or thirst? Do you get tired 2-4 hrs after you eat? Do you urinate frequently? Do you ever suffer from blurred vision? Your doctor can test your urine to see if you're peeing out glucose. If you don't eat for several hours and your urine still has glucose in it, that's an indication that you may have some degree of type II diabetes.
If you do develop type II diabetes, chances are you won't know about it for years and years, because it's so gradual. By then, moderate to serious neuropathy may have set in, as well as a degree of retinopathy. Circulation to your extremities will have been reduced. If you let it go for too long, you could end up losing your sight, or your legs. I did a BKA (below knee amputation) on a 67-year-old type II diabetic on Tuesday. He wasn't obese, either.
In case you can ony think in single syllables I'll try a third form: Leave!
No, no! Don't you see, this guy is the best thing that's happened to Mac evangelism in a long, long time. If the PC fanatics argue that Macs are more expensive, or that they have fewer games available, they come off sounding reasonable. You actually have to refute their arguments to get people to see reason.
But guys like this make claims like "Microsoft's hardware is better than Apple's!" That kind of statement is obviously false on its face, even to the most uncritical reader. One glance at that kind of bull leads even the most jaded person to the obvious conclusion: "Hey, maybe I should go check out the Apple store."
Explain to me how your 51:1 compressed video looks "virtually indistinguishable from the uncompressed master", unless of course you've never actually seen uncompressed 1080i.
Two reasons: your monitor, and the nature of temporal compression.
Consumer HD equipment can't resolve all of the lines in an HD frame. My personal set will hold about 800 lines, which isn't bad at all. Average consumer gear will hold maybe 600. A Sony broadcast monitor will hold 1000, or even more. So "softness" that shows up on a 40" broadcast monitor can't be seen on even the best 34" home set.
Furthermore, MPEG-2 compression works by reducing the number of bits used to describe a segment of the stream, rather than by reducing the number of bits used for every frame. If you shoot actors in front of a fixed camera, MPEG-2 will be able to compress that stream significantly because the background doesn't change at all from one frame to the next. Most of the pixels won't change, or at least they won't change much.
Of course, if you swish-pan the camera around, the the difference between frame N and frame N+1 will be very great, so you won't be able to describe each frame as fully within the maximum number of bits per second, so you'll get visible artifacts.
I've seen side-by-side comparisons at WFAA-TV in Dallas, which has been broadcasting OTA HD for several years now. They used to-- I don't know if they still do-- have two identical Sony HD monitors in their control room, one showing the uncompressed 272M feed going to the encoder and another showing the "monitor" output from the encoder, showing the 19.3 Mbps signal that would go out over the tower. Ignoring the (roughly) 2 second delay for encoding, the two signals looked pretty much identical.
I have no doubt that that's true in the UK; since I've never been there, I'll take your word for it.
But I own an HDTV. I watch, I guess, about eight or ten hours of week of over-the-air HD programming. (If you take out Leno, which I watch in spite of the host, that comes down to about 3-5 hours a week.)
Over-the-air HD programming in the US is pretty f*cking amazing. I've got a trained eye, I suppose you'd say, so I can see compression artifacts when watching some sports programming, but it's visually indistinguishable from uncompressed HD almost all the time. And my girlfriend, who isn't used to looking for artifacts, thinks it's positively perfect.
Digital transmission-- be it over wires or 8VSB or satellite-- is just a medium, like any other. It can be used to carry a clean signal or a noisy one, depending on what you feed into it and other outside factors.
For example, I used to have digital cable TV, for standard definition programming. The picture looked like ass, because the cable company was compressing it down to 1 Mbps or less for transmission, in order to squeeze more channels into their service. Naturally, I cancelled their service and bought a satellite dish. It's not uncompressed, by any means, but it's much better.
So don't just jump to the conclusion that "digital TV is nearly unwatchable." It's more accurate to say that a particular broadcaster's signal-- which happens to be a digital signal-- is nearly unwatchable. For every shitty 2 Mbps cable channel out there, there's a 19 Mbps OTA HD station showing programming that's virtually indistinguishable from the uncompressed master.
(Okay, actually the ratio isn't anywhere near one-to-one yet, and I know that. I was just trying to make the point that digital != bad, but rather some digital == bad while some digital == good.)
my box is a 500MHz P3 laptop, and thus far slower than your G3 systems, and I find the performance more than acceptable.
I suspect that perhaps our definitions of "acceptable" are somewhat different.
Tried Chimera, or any other alternate Gecko frontends?
Yup. They're all embarrassingly slow, sorry to say. I don't mean any disrespect to the hard work that no doubt have gone into these various projects, but they're just not usable browsers yet.
OmniWeb, on the other hand, is fast on my relatively old hardware (400 and 500 MHz G3s), feature-rich, and rock-solid stable.
Absolutely I remember it, although I have to say that I had forgotten it entirely until you mentioned it.
I don't have any information about it for you; I just wanted to let you know that you're not alone.
If you are in first or business class, you can always buy their on-board power cords that hook up into the plane (depending on airline).
I know the submitter is going to Europe from the US, which makes it astoundingly unlikely that he's flying on Qantas, but I just wanted to chime in here and say from experience that Qantas does not, as far as I know, have DC power in any of their planes. I flew to Sydney recently, which is 14 hours from LAX. No power anywhere, not even up in First, according to the sexy stews-- er, I mean flight attendants. And that was on a relatively new 747-400!
Fortunately I knew in advance and I was able to expense five new batteries for my iBook. I watched five or six DVDs on the way down there.
(Oh, one more thing. If you pack a bunch of batteries, get to the airport extra early. Those things show up as solid white rectangles on x-ray monitors. The security people don't like that, especially when you're carrying half a dozen of 'em.)
What part of "Ask slashdot" don't you understand?
First of all, I'm getting pretty tired of this "what part of blank do you not understand" thing. It's trite. Find a new expression.
More importantly, though, why did you take my statement out of context? The poster said he thought my idea was ludicrous. I replied that nobody asked him whether it's ludicrous or not.
See? Simple.